The caller ident read Matt Ryan. Anna had been maudlin about deleting his name and number from the phone's memory. It was a foolish, silly thing, but she'd kept putting it off; perhaps on some level she was denying the reality of what had happened six months ago on Q Street.
She gripped the handheld, her knuckles turning white around the silver casing. Slowly, Anna raised it to her ear, tapping the answer pad. "Who is this?"
The voice at the other end was electronically distorted, all trace of identity bled out. "You and I need to have a talk." Kelso's training instinctively kicked in; she tried to listen through the masking filter, looking for the cadence and pattern of the voice, profiling the speaker in her mind.
"Whoever you are, you're not Matt Ryan. So I'm hanging up-"
"That would be a mistake," said the voice. "I spoofed the caller ID so youd pick up. Because I'm guessing right now that you're not in the mood to talk to people. Not after what happened at the pier."
Her throat went dry. "What pier?"
"Don't talk to me like I'm stupid, Agent Kelso. I really hate it when people do that."
"Then show me the same courtesy," she snapped, her patience wearing thin. "Who the hell are you and what do you want? Answer that or get lost."
Anna heard a faint sigh. "You can call me D-Bar. And like I said, I wanna talk to you."
"We are talking."
"Well, when I say I want to, I really mean we want to. And not over an open line. In person."
She drifted back toward the closet, reaching for the pistol. "Uh-huh. And who is 'we'?"
"A group you may have heard of. We call ourselves the Juggernaut Collective. We're kind of a big deal."
Anna's hand froze on the gun. "If you know who I am and what happened out at the pier, then you know the last thing I'm going to do is talk to a terrorist." She should have disconnected, right then and there; but instead she waited.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Yeah, trite, maybe, but true." The sigh came again. "Look, let's cut to the chase, 'cos
I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this conduit secure. You went to that wannabe Widow and her crew and they gave you some scraps. But the fact is, she's a bottom-feeder and she was never going to get you what you need. We can. We're looking for the same thing."
"I don't know what you're talking about-"
"The Tyrants. Do you want to know who they are or not?" Anna said nothing, and after a moment the voice returned. "I'll take your silence for a yes. Check your messages. If we see anyone but you, that name will be all you'll ever get." The connection cut with a click; a moment later, the vu-phone beeped. In the message cue was a street address in downtown Washington, D.C., and a meeting time two hours hence.
In the bathroom she paused to splash a handful of cold water on her face. Two hours; that barely gave her enough time to throw on a fresh set of clothes and bolt out the door.
And she was tired. The events in New York, the time in the cells, the nervous tension of the flight home… The fatigue from all of it was exerting a heavy, tidal drag on her. She couldn't afford to do this half-awake. She couldn't afford to miss something.
Anna reached for the door to the medicine cabinet without looking in the mirror.
Knightsbridge-London-Great Britain
The town house had once been a hotel, an exclusive boutique lodge in a shady mews just a few blocks away from the greensward of Hyde Park.
Like so much of the city, it sat in unconcerned contrast with the sheer-sided corporate towers emerging from the streets around it, the pale stone of the five-story exterior understated, the rectangular windows lit from within by a warm glow not lost through the thickness of armored polyglass. From the outside, it seemed no different from any of its neighbors; but the structure of the town house was reinforced and hardened against anything up to a rocket attack.
Saxon glanced around the fourth-floor room and took in the clean, sparse decor; white walls and chrome-framed furniture. A print of Rubin's
The Flute Player hung on one wall, a large thinscreen monitor mirroring it on the far side of the room. The six operatives sat around a long, glass-topped conference table, each dressed in what passed for civilian attire-although to a trained eye none of the Tyrants could shake the aura of a soldier, even when armor and weapons were out of reach.
At first, Saxon thought the town house was some sort of operations center, perhaps the London base for the Tyrants; but then he had glimpsed slivers of the rooms on the lower floors through half-open doors. He saw living spaces, a study, a kitchen-and dotted around, the touches that showed a family lived in this place. On the third-floor landing, Saxon passed a framed photo and had to look twice; Jaron Namir gazed back out at him, dressed in a suit and wearing a yarmulke, smiling broadly. A woman in yellow and two children, a boy and a girl, shared his good cheer.
The image was jarring; try as he might, Saxon couldn't connect the man in the picture with the man he had seen kill silently with no pause, no flicker of remorse.
They were in Namir's home. Something about the idea of that ground against Saxon's every ingrained instinct. The idea of a man like him, a man like Namir having a life and a family outside the unit, seemed false. Somehow, unfair.
In the wake of the mission in Moscow, the team had gone through a cursory review aboard the transport plane as it flew west, back into
European airspace. As with every other operational debrief, Saxon had felt as if they were going through the motions, not just for themselves, but for some unseen observer. The people who gave the orders were watching, he was certain of it. Not for the first time, he wondered if they would ever show their faces.
Seated around the table, Namir led them through the postmortem once again. On the plane, they had given their reports one at a time; now, with all of them together, Saxon felt the pressure of the unanswered questions in his thoughts.
He leaned forward. "I could have brought Kontarsky in alive."
Hardesty gave him an arch look. "Was that ever the objective?"
Saxon ignored him, turning to Namir. "You said Kontarsky was working with Juggernaut. He was a high-value target. He must have had intel we could use."
"The minister was compromised," Namir replied. "Anything we'd have been able to compel from him through interrogation would have been marginal at best. We didn't need what he knew."
Saxon's eyes narrowed. Despite what Namir had told him earlier, he was sure of Kontarsky's reaction when he mentioned Operation Rainbird.
The name meant nothing to the man.
Namir saw his train of thought and headed him off. "You need to see past this, Ben. Don't make it personal. Kontarsky was a cancer in the
Russian federal government. We cut him out."
"Sends a message," offered Barrett in a languid tone. "Anyone deals with Juggernaut, they're not protected."
"We're not in the business of taking prisoners," Namir went on. "You know that."
Hardesty leaned back in his chair. "As we're on the subject, maybe the limey can explain why it is he didn't just double-tap the creep the moment he found him?"
"I told you. I could have brought him in."
"You don't get to make that choice," Hardesty replied. "You're not in command of this unit.
We're not your little PMC scout troop, Saxon. You lost that, remember?"
Saxon studied the other man. "Maybe if you were actually on the deck with the rest of us, instead of hiding behind a camo net four hundred meters away, I might have some respect for your opinion, Yank" He gave the last word a sneer. "Don't make the mistake of thinking you see everything down that rifle scope."